15 Alexa skills for the enterprise

Already at work in millions of homes, Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant is now ready to play a role in the enterprise.

While Amazon expects the move will lead to the creation of new Alexa ‘skills’ or voice commands specifically for businesses, there are already plenty that can help you with your work, whether you’re a developer, an admin, or just looking for some help with business analytics or your to-do list.

As you check out these skills, remember that Alexa is accessible not just from the Echo on your kitchen counter, but also from your smartphone – whether you’re walking, driving or chilling – and also your PC.

Any.do

Alexa can already remember your to-do and shopping lists, but unfortunately that’s where they stay: In your Alexa-enabled device or your Alexa app. If you’re a fan of another list app, you’ll need Alexa to learn a new skill to work with it.

The Any.do skill is, predictably, designed to work with Any.do, a list manager that also runs on Android, iOS or Chrome devices, in desktop browsers and even through Slack. It needs to be linked to an Any.do account and is limited to managing your to-do and shopping lists.

There’s little risk of Any.do’s shopping list integrating with your corporate purchasing system, but at least it lets you remember to get that tube of toothpaste on the way home so you can concentrate on real work.

Cloud Admin

Cloud Admin LLC exists just to provide the Cloud Admin skill for Alexa.

It links up with your Amazon Web Services account and allows you to inventory the instances you have running on your account, find out how much they’re costing you, and start and stop them, all by voice.

CheckedIn

No longer just for finding work, today LinkedIn is also used for doing work – especially if you're in marketing, where a steady drip-drip-drip of thoughts about your business trickling into contacts’ news feeds can help promote your business.

So maybe there’s something you want to tell your LinkedIn contacts, but you’ve got your hands full with something else. Now you can use the third-party skill CheckedIn to ask Alexa to update your feed with a new insight, status change or pithy quote.

Runtime Helper

Make sure you turn this one off if you’re interviewing for a junior programmer, in case Alexa butts in and answer on their behalf.

Knowing how the running time of an algorithm will scale with the volume of data is key to making code run efficiently. That makes it a popular interview question for potential new hires straight out of college. With so many algorithms to choose from, though, some of us are apt to forget whether Shell sort, say, runs in quasilinear – O(n logk n) – or subquadratic time.

That’s where Runtime Helper comes in. It’s a vocal crib-sheet for the time complexity of algorithms, always willing to remind you of what you once knew about average access, search, insertion and deletion times.

Vigil Website Monitoring

No more hunching over that console: Now you can say “Alexa, ask Vigil: Is my site down?” to get a status update on your website.

This Alexa skill from Heirloom is free, but must be linked with a paid account at its Vigil: Website Monitoring service to work. Prices for that service start at $4.99 a month.

Skills like this will be more useful, though, when they can contact you when there's something to report – “Alexa, ask Vigil to tell me if my site goes down” rather than expecting you to make regular checks.

Bug Tracker

If you’re a regular contributor to, or user of, Apache open source projects, then you might be interested in a hotline to the project’s JIRA bug-tracking system.

That’s what this Alexa skill provides, allowing you to find out how many open or recently closed tickets a particular project has, or get an update on the status of a particular ticket.

Although Bug Tracker is hard-coded to query Apache.org’s instance of JIRA, author Mariano Gonzalez has published the code for the skill on Github, allowing anyone to create a version that links to their own bug tracker.